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How Syria's civil war haunts Syrian Canadians

Social media means Syrian Canadians can follow the devastation of their country in great detail. They fret about loved ones who remain or are now refugees.

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Syrian Activist Rami Kaai talks to the Star. For the 51-year-old Syrian Christian who moved to Canada in 2006 with his wife and two, now teenage, children, the war in Syria is personal.(Vince Talotta/Toronto Star)

By Peter GoodspeedAtkinson Fellow

Fri., Sept. 19, 2014

The trauma and terror of Syria’s destruction isn’t confined to the Middle East. It creeps into homes in the GTA every day with the mere click of a computer mouse.

Photographs on Facebook show shattered cities. War crime videos capture rebels eating a soldier’s lung or the bodies of children killed by chemical weapons. Personal blogs catalogue the dead or describe the dangers of daily life.

The YouTube revolution that sent tens of thousands of Syrian protesters into the streets three years ago has mutated. It has produced the most heavily documented humanitarian disaster in decades as social media cover a war in which few reporters have even made it to the battlefield.

As 9 million people have fled for their lives, families and friends in Canada have watched each horrifying step on the Internet — while most Canadians remained blissfully ignorant of their agony .

“Every street in Syria has a website, every street,” says Rami Kaai, a 51-year-old North York accountant. “You can search by street name, not by area. People post news, photographs, lists of the dead. They tell you what is going on.”

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Satellite phones, Skype and computer programs such as WhatsApp instantly link people through images and text over the Internet or their cellphones and give fresh insight into the conflict. But they also fuel the fears and frustrations of those desperately seeking refuge for family members, friends and former neighbours.

“I just got a call from my best friend yesterday,” Kaai said in March. “I lost a friend. There was an explosion in Homs. This guy was a super guy. He studied with me for three years and, you know, he didn’t have the power to kill a bug . . . But he was walking in the street and there was a car bomb, and they can’t even find his body.”

For Kaai, a 51-year-old Syrian Christian who moved to Canada in 2006 with his wife and two, now teenage, children, the war in Syria is personal. Homs, their hometown, has been all but obliterated. Most of the Christians who lived there were forced to flee.

Under siege for three years, Homs was bombed and mortared in some of the most vicious street-to-street fighting of the war. Starved of food and medical supplies, people who remained in the Old City ate leaves and lived in fear of arbitrary arrest, torture, drive-by killings, kidnappings and sexual violence.

“What happens in Syria you can’t imagine,” says Hiyam Kholi, Kaai’s wife, and a design engineer. “Even animals don’t do that. Cut a child’s arms and legs and leave them in front of the parents. Pregnant women have the baby cut from them. This is not human.

“Syria now is hell,” she sobs. “It is the only way you can describe it.I’m not with the government. I’m not with the rebels. I’m telling you the truth. It is hell.”

North York accountant Rami Kaai immigrated to Canada from Syria with his wife and two children before that country's civil war began. The conflict has forced about 80,000 Christians in the city of Homs, including members of Kaai's family, to flee the country, and Kaai has been working to bring his brothers and other relatives here. (Vince Talotta / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

A 1997 wedding at Our Lady of Peace church, which Rami Kaai and his family attended when they lived in Homs, Syria.

Our Lady of Peace in Homs, Syria, as it appears now.

Our Lady of Peace church in Homs, Syria, after it was destroyed during the civil war.

For three years, Kaai’s family has watched helplessly as the situation in Syria deteriorated and their relatives were forced to scramble for safety.

The estimated 80,000 Christians in Homs were forced to flee in early 2012 when they were trapped by the war and targeted by Islamist extremists. They received death threats and witnessed kidnappings, rape, torture, beheadings and forced marriages and conversions.

There were summary executions and church burnings. Religious sites were desecrated, clergymen kidnapped, community centres destroyed and schools blown up.

One day, Kholi telephoned her parents’ house in Homs, only to hear a stranger answer the phone, saying, “Nobody here, sister, nobody here. Those people, they left.”

“I went crazy,” recalls Kholi. “I asked them. ‘What are you doing in my parents’ house,’ and they started complaining to me: ‘Do you see what the regime is doing to us. Nobody is here. I am protecting the houses from the regime.’ ”

Another day, Kaai saw his old family home burning in a YouTube video. “They were saying rockets were being fired in the area,” he says. “We could see the smoke coming from my parents’ building.”

Early on in the conflict, crowds of Sunni militants marched through Christian areas of Homs chanting, “Christians go to Beirut; Alawites (the sect of Syrian President Bashar Assad) to the grave.”

Kaai saw the protests on television and checked to see if his family was safe.

“They were slow to see it,” he says. “One day they would say, ‘It is no problem, I can still go buy bread.’ Then, a week later, ‘It is all right, it’s just in the street beside us’. Then it would be in our street.

“One day, they killed a guy right under my parents’ balcony,” he continues. “The guy worked with state security. He was on a motorcycle and a car came by and they killed him. There is a video online. Pop, pop, pop . . . they took 10 to 15 shots and killed him.”

Kaai’s two brothers and his 81-year-old widowed father finally had to flee and sought refuge with relatives.

Kholi’s parents fled to relatives elsewhere in Syria, and her younger brother, his wife and infant daughter walked across the border into Lebanon.

For the past three years, Kaai and his wife have been struggling to rescue their relatives.

A member of Jesus the King Melkite Catholic Church in Thornhill, Kaai helped establish Food for Syria, an organization that collects, purchases and distributes emergency food hampers and basic medicines to refugees and displaced people in Syria.

He also worked with the local chapter of the Knights of Columbus to set up a church-based group to sponsor up to 14 refugees and deposited $75,000 of his own money in trust with the group as a guarantee to sponsor his two brothers, his brother-in-law and their families as refugees.

In early August, Kholi’s brother, Monaf Kholi, 33, his wife, Zeina, 23, and their 3-year-old daughter, Reeda, were among the first privately sponsored Syrian refugees to arrive in Canada.

In July 2013, the Canadian government agreed to accept 200 government-sponsored and 1,100 privately sponsored Syrian refugees. Since then it has been severely criticized by Syrian Canadians and refugee resettlement and human rights groups for delays in meeting those quotas.

In June, when Syria’s civil war marked its third anniversary of civil war, Canada’s immigration system had managed to resettle fewer than 150 Syrian refugees over the entire course of the war.

A computer specialist who worked for Petro-Canada Syria (a division of Calgary-based Suncor) for five years, Monaf Kholi spent nearly two and a half years in Lebanon after fleeing Homs when rebels threatened to shoot him.

“They knew that I worked in computers and they asked me to help them configure some radio devices for them,” he says. “I refused directly. But they next came with a gun and said, ‘If you don’t help us, that means you are against us.’

“But I’m against nobody. I want to live in peace in my home, in my house with my family. They don’t understand.

“We didn’t take anything with us,” he recalls. “We had one bag with our passports, certificates and documents. We just closed the door and ran away.

“There were many roadblocks on the street. Some of these people you can talk to. They were local. But some others were very, very bad. They were not Syrian . . . They want to make a Muslim country. They don’t care about our history or if we are neighbours or went to school together. They came to fight in Syria, to make money or to die.”

Some rebels in Syria earn a salary, others augment their income through kidnappings and extortion.

Monaf’s wife has an uncle, a taxi driver in Homs, who was kidnapped last year and hasn’t been seen since, despite his family paying a $30,000 ransom.

When Monaf and his family escaped to Lebanon, they lived with a widowed aunt in Beirut.

Kaai’s two brothers, Rasami, 57, a mechanical engineer, and Remon, 46, an agricultural engineer, also escaped to Beirut, and their families now share a small two-room house that belongs to a distant cousin.

Unable to work legally in Lebanon, they lived for two years on money Kaai and his wife sent them.

Now, Kaai is anticipating the arrival of his brothers and their families in Canada on Sept. 25. They’ve been cleared for resettlement here.

Kaai says they were under enormous stress in Lebanon. “If they find work, like cash under the table, it is like slavery. If they don’t have family from outside to support them, for just $200 a month or so, what happens to them?”

During his exile in Lebanon, Monaf sometimes despaired of ever making it to Canada.

“The uncertainty was hard,” he says. “We stayed in Lebanon and at first we had the hope to come back to Syria. But watching the news one night on Al Arabiya (television) we saw our house in Homs was occupied. We saw all our area, our neighbours’ houses, completely destroyed. I saw people were in my house doing a report about the rockets that were falling.

“We got crazy. This is our house. This is our history. This is our memory. It was everything for us.”

Delays in approving his sponsorship nearly forced Monaf to seek help elsewhere. As a student, he studied in Ukraine, and, as his money was running out in Lebanon, he contemplated returning there — until that country slid into its own civil war.

“Nobody is safe in Syria now,” says Monaf. “Before, it was very difficult to look at the pictures. You see a street completely destroyed and you remember, this is my school. My friend’s house was here.

“But now it is OK. It’s just a fact now. What can we do? It’s all in the past. All we can do now is look ahead and worry about our future.”

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